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San Francisco-based Scribd has launched an all-you-can-read subscription service featuring thousands of books from HarperCollins’ back catalogue. For $8.99 U.S. a month, customers can read as many books as they want through an app on their smartphones, tablets and computers.

Launching Tuesday, and available in Canada, it can be described as a Netflix for books, and is another sign of how that company’s success is spawning imitators across all media.

Scribd is known as an online document company, using their iPaper technology to allow users to embed documents on websites, but it has also been an online digital bookseller with reportedly 80 million active readers coming to the site every month.

This new subscription service features books published by Harper Collins before July 2012, as well as some smaller publishers. Newer titles can be bought from the Scribd site. Among the “trending” titles are a series of books by Neil Gaiman, Bridge to Terabithia from Katherine Paterson and The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.

The company is offering a free one-month trial, and as users sign up, they are asked to select at least three areas of interest from categories such as Fiction, Science Fiction, Biographies, Cookbooks and more. Then users are asked to rate five books from those categories, to help the system offer recommended books. Lastly, there’s an option to follow several authors and publications, to help build your Scribd online profile.

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The books are read through apps on Apple or Android devices, with the option of downloading them onto the device. As well, Scribd will keep track of where readers left off in a book, if you switch between, say, a smartphone or a tablet. Scribd does not support e-ink readers like the Amazon Kindle or Kobo.

With this move, HarperCollins becomes the first major U.S. publisher to create a subscription service.

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